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Truman quote debate hits gossip site: Follow-up on TeleBlog post about N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd
July 29, 2008 | 4:35 pm
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By David Rothman
Okay, so Jossip isn’t the Columbia Journalism Review.
And the headline is a tad overdone: New York Times rocked by Maureen Dowd’s Harry Truman quote scandal—even if there’s a qualifier in a smaller font, "According to a loose definition of the word ‘rocked.’"
Still, it’s good to see more people wondering if Harry Truman actually said, "If you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog," a quote that appeared first in Ms. Dowd’s work for the Times. The TeleBlog is simply the most recent outfit to revive the issue, having been preceded over the years by USA Today and presumably others. The Truman Library can’t find such a quote, just a similar one in a play whose author probably used dramatic license: "You want a friend in life, get a dog!"
The real news: Times public editor ignoring issue—while the NYT still uses the quote
Here’s the real news, the fresh twist in the controversy. The office of Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt shrugged off the matter when I queried him. Michael McElroy e-mailed me that it was outside Hoyt’s jurisdiction because "its use was before Mr. Hoyt’s tenure and therefore outside of our purview."
Wrong. As I showed earlier this morning, Times writers are still using Ms. Dowd’s memorable Truman quote on occasion, even if just paraphrased (here, for example).
Of greater import, should there be a statute of limitations on inaccurate quotes spread through the Web, especially if the writer is still working for the a paper of record like the Times? And why haven’t I gotten an answer to my query to Ms. Dowd via a Web form a month ago? Hoyt’s office won’t even give me her e-mail address (no, the old liberties@times.com apparently isn’t working, judging from a bounce-back) so I can be certain she received my question. The answer would be helpful for history’s sake, and as a fan of Ms. Dowd’s, I’m hoping she can get a witty column out of all this.
A new Dowd quote controversy, based on last Wednesday’s column
Meanwhile Jossip alerts us that the Times "issued a correction, for Dowd’s column last Wednesday, where she’s accused of making up a quote" for her essay on Barack Obama and related matters.
Um, not necessarily! Her source could have been wrong or have made the quote up—not Ms. Dowd. Or maybe someone is backtracking at Ms. Dowd’s expense? So in the Times’ place, I wouldn’t wonder as much about that as about the Truman quote.
A Dan Rather parallel?
For now, I see a bit of a potential parallel with Dan Rather’s job-ending crisis at CBS News. He was and is a hero of mine and might still be working there if he and CBS had been fully responsive in a timely way to outside queries. As a Dowd fan, I hope she’ll give us the full story. Unless the circumstances are really outrageous, my own preference would be an emphatic, "Fire her not." I just want to know how she came to use the quote, and who or what her source was, and I’m certain the Truman Library would be just as curious. Only if she stonewalls us will I start thinking, "Off with her head." Someone wrote a book once called To Engineer is Human. Ditto for journalism. So-called fabrications can actually have the most innocent of origins, and just who in the profession is errorless?
Meanwhile the real Columbia Journalism Review might want to discuss the Truman quote and the public editor’s office in context of journalistic accountability—in the era of Web-posted archives. Here’s part of the USA Today blog item for the Times and CJR to chew on: "According to Susan Medler, spokeswoman at the Harry S. Truman Library & Museum, archivists there have not been able to turn up any evidence that Truman ever said that. It seems likely, she says, that it’s been attributed to him because of a similar line in the play Give ‘Em Hell Harry, and a 1989 Maureen Dowd report in The New York Times in which she put the words into Truman’s mouth." Once again: Aside from the put-in-mouth question, is there a statute of limitations on inaccurate quotes?
Related: Other posts related to my forthcoming D.C. newspaper novel, The Solomon Scandals, which more or less concludes with the get-a-dog line. That was what got me intrigued. I wanted to guard the credibility of my talking Afghan Hound, Thackeray II, who shows up at the end of my epilogue set in the late 21st century and uses the quote in a fund-raiser for "pre-virtual literacy." The dubious nature of the quote came to light when I was fact-checking the witticism via Google.
Technorati Tags: Maureen Dowd,New York Times,journalism,media,media criticism,Clark Hoyt,public editor,ombudsmen,ombudsman,newspapers,columnists,op-ed,Harry Truman,Harry S. Truman,Afghan Hounds,The Solomon Scandals
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Comments:
You are really a dog with a bone on this issue. All that is going to happen is that the quote will become “attributed to Harry Truman”. Imagine if someone expunged all the phrases attributed to Mark Twain or Winston Churchill.
Thanks MMD. But consider the real point of the bone chewing. Ms. Dowd is refusing to do a retraction or explain why she won’t despite the evidence from the Truman Library, and the Times’ public editor won’t even share her e-mail address to help me get an explanation. The greater issue is, Does anyone care about accurate history, in this case, at a newspaper of record? And what about media accountability in the era of the Net? As both a New York Times fan and the writer of a newspaper novel, I care immensely about such matters. Glad to see you here, whether or not we agree on the importance of the Dowd question. Thanks. David
You might be able to convince New York Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt to investigate now because of the more recent article by Sam Roberts that you link. It contains a paraphrase of the dubious quote attributed to Truman and it is dated September 27, 2007.
Since Hoyt’s term began on May 14, 2007 (according to your previous post) the September 2007 version of the quote should be within his purview. Maybe you could ask Hoyt to investigate the article by Roberts instead of the one by Dowd?
The quest may seem quixotic to some but I can understand your deep interest in the accuracy of your own book.
Garson, thanks for understanding the importance of this. Yes, it should be clear that the Roberts item brings the Dowd quote issue within Clark Hoyt’s jurisdiction. Investigate the Roberts article instead? Sure, LOL.
If I really need to, perhaps I can try to contact Roberts and others who relied on the Dowd quote and see what they feel about its being out there—ready to trap the unwary. But before I do that, maybe I’ll do a wrap-up for Hoyt and see if that finally gets his attention.
I still haven’t heard from Dowd, by the way. While Hoyt’s office wouldn’t share her e-mail address, I’ve now used the Web form twice. No reply after a day.
So now, instead of simply asking Hoyt’s office for her e-mail address, I’m going to see if it’ll investigate Dowd. The idea isn’t to get her fired unless something totally outrageous happened; I just want to know why this apparent fiction has been on the Web so long from a paper of record. And how did it happen in the first place? No jihad against the Times. Beyond my interest in the accuracy of The Solomon Scandals, it’s in fact a sign of respect that I care about the matter. I’d never go to this trouble if she’d been writing for Podunk Daily.
David
The quote attributed to Truman about friendship and dogs is very popular, so I decided to do some searching. The earliest citation that has an attribution to Harry Truman that I could find today using the internet was inside a book of quotations:
In the “Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations” by John Gordon Burke (1981), J. G. Burke distributed by Gaylord. This information was found via Google Book Search but it can be checked more directly using the website of an organization called the “Magazine Research Center”. There is a query engine for an updated version of the “Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations” here and a search with “speaker: Truman” and “keyword: dog” yields the information above.
So John Gordon Burke is pointing to “New West” magazine, Vol. 3, p. 33, December 4, 1978 as a seminal document. Wikipedia gives some background on the magazine as follows “New West, a sister magazine on “New York”‘s model that covered California life, was also published for a few years in the 1970s.” This quote citation is indirect and I have not actually seen this issue of “New West”. If some blog reader has access to old issues of “New West” or a database it would be useful to have a larger context for the text.
Recall that the play by Samuel G. Gallu, “Give ‘Em Hell, Harry,” was produced on Broadway in 1975. So it is possible that the “New West” writer was influenced by the play. Yet the play is a dramatic work that may have been fictionalized. The quote it contains may have been misattributed, concocted, or inaccurate.
When did the city of Washington appear in the quote? It happened by 1987 and that is before Maureen Dowd’s 1989 column.
In the New York Times article “Prospects” dated June 7, 1987. The article solicited advice for Alan Greenspan who was the incoming Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Boskin was one of the advice givers.
In a letter to the New York Times dated October 15, 1987 by TIMOTHY B. NORBECK Executive Director Connecticut State Medical Society New Haven. The existence of these two letters suggests that the incorporation of Washington into the dubious quote had already disseminated from coast to coast by 1987.